The second-hand clothing market gained momentum with the pandemic due to the need to generate extra income and the high price of new clothing, coupled with growing awareness of the impact ecological fashion, according to sources consulted by Télam.

On the other hand, the price of clothing and footwear increased 65% year-on-year in June and was positioned as the item with the highest increase of all the categories measured by the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses ( Indec).

“We connect users who want to sell the clothes they no longer wear with people who want to buy good brand clothes, in good condition, at good prices,” said Cecilia Membrado, founder and CEO of the second-hand clothing online site Renew Your Dressing Room (RTV).

Due to the pandemic, published products increased by almost 100%: the monthly average of products published in 2019 was 100,000 and in 2020 it was 190,000.

Membrado affirmed that “many in the pandemic lost their jobs and we saw that the published products grew; last year a user generated income of 4 million pesos, which gives an average of 300 thousand pesos per month”.

He considered that “many factors accelerate the use of this type of platform, when people need an additional source of income they become more creative, it is a collaborative economy, like someone who takes their car and becomes an Uber, someone else sees what they have in his dressing room and how to make income from that.”

In this regard, the founder of RTV explained that the average price per second-hand unit in Argentina is around $1,500 pesos, well below the values ​​of new garments, and mentioned among the most sold brands Zara, Rhapsody, Jasmine Chebar, Nike, Adidas, Jackie Smith and H&M.

In this sense, he analyzed that “people want to continue dressing with the brands they like, but they are not willing to pay an average salary for a coat, so they buy it second-hand and then sells it, it is a virtuous circle”.

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Brenda Andersen, founder together with Constanza Darderes of the store “Cocoliche Ropa con otra Oportunidad”, told Télam that “the prices we manage at Cocoliche are approximately one third of the prices of new clothes; They are cheap prices, but at the same time we try to make it an attractive proposal for both the buyer and the seller”. “When setting prices we take into account the type of garment, the brand and the condition”, he explained.

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— Emily Wed Jul 14 17:39:07 +0000 2021

Cocoliche has stores in La Plata, Palermo and the online store www.somoscocoliche.com, where you can buy and sell carefully selected second-hand clothes with a consignment system, in which the seller receives 50% as the garments are sold, or direct sales system, in which the seller receives 30% of the sale price at the time of delivering the clothing. “With the start of the pandemic we opened the online store, where you can buy clothes for women, men and children with shipping throughout the country; This store allowed us to reach all the provinces; today the online store represents 25% of our global sales”, said Andersen.

He pointed out that there are “a greater number of people willing to sell what they no longer use; the pandemic could have provided time at home to order and select what is no longer used and also because it is a way to obtain money at the moment”.

Meanwhile, he stressed that “buying and selling used clothing is a more planet-friendly fashion consumption habit, reducing the pollution caused in the clothing manufacturing process by extending the useful life of an already made; sustainable fashion is the fashion of the future”.

“We believe that, while people are going to circulate and sell what they no longer use, other profitable ways of producing garments with less negative consequences on the planet will be generated”, he confided.

Similarly, Membrado observed that one of the factors driving this market is “social awareness of how polluting the fashion industry is; there are brands that have huge collections and end up burning the clothes because they don't sell them”.

In fact, second-hand clothing in the world is advancing even faster than "fast fashion" -low-cost mass production of fashion garments- with a growth rate of 185% per year, while that fast fashion advances at 20% per year.

Sandra Crowl, director of administration at Carmignac, analyzed that "fast fashion is not sustainable from an environmental point of view, since it requires the use of huge amounts of land and water, in addition to generating tons of emissions and toxic waste ”. According to the specialist, this sector "is the second most polluting clean water worldwide (after oil), and will generate a quarter of carbon emissions worldwide by 2050."

As an example, making a jean requires 7,500 liters of water, which is the equivalent of what an average person consumes in 7 years. "Last year, with the purchases in Renová Tu Vestidor, the use of more than 3,000 million liters of water was avoided and around 40 million tons of CO2 emissions have been avoided," concluded Membrado.

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